Cultural Perspectives on Familial Belonging

The volume takes a close look at the forms and functions of family and kinship in cultural narratives in the United States. It analyzes social and cultural contexts of kinship and family membership, relations of family and nation on a metaphorical level, and the political discourses that regulate sexuality and reproduction. Representations of family and kinship inform all aspects of American life, which is prominently noticeable in politics, legislation, art, and the media. Family discourses are employed to communicate and negotiate constellations of power and they can serve to investigate differences, struggles, alliances, strategic endeavors, and innovative conceptualizations of kinship. The essays collected in this volume provide readings of texts across various genres that highlight the role of cultural production in reconfiguring paradigms of family and kinship in the US.

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This essay interrogates the position of visually harsh and aesthetically challenging entertainment products with regard to their media history and their exemplary intertextual appropriations by two contemporary writers. It is through the “slasher” genre and crude and brutal films that notions of familyhood, adolescent turmoil, and home are frequently negotiated, challenged, and shattered in American mass culture. The velocities and spectacles hinging on sharp-edged knives will be sketched; a subsequent tracing of these cuts begins with a look at Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal Psycho and moves towards three subsequent works, which will be considered and aligned to the notion of the broken home and the dissipation of health and order – Wes Craven’s film Last House on the Left, Stephen Graham Jones’s novel Demon Theory, and Charles Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole. All these works are part of a mass cultural practice that explores and engages the interplay of sudden affect and persistent atmospheres. Here, cinematic principles enable creators to paradoxically explore velocities and reflexivity on the one side but also melancholy and self-awareness on the other.

Not unlike the Western, so-called slasher films seem to be disturbingly simple with their clichéd routines – their generic limits, however, remain blurry but always orbit around physical violence, predominantly against human tissues and bodies. Writers and directors continue to re-invent the “slashing” tradition. This kind of cinematic entertainment has frequently been classified within a grid of “high” or “low” cultural standards, but such a differentiation only endorses a normative order...

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